Turning state hospital over to private firm is bad medicine

Updated 9:21 pm, Friday, September 7, 2012

A prison guard looks over the Reeves County Detention Center, which is managed by the GEO Group. GEO Care, a subsidiary, is seeking a contract to manage a state mental health hospital.

A prison guard looks over the Reeves County Detention Center, which is managed by the GEO Group. GEO Care, a subsidiary, is seeking a contract to manage a state mental health hospital.

Photo: DONNA MCWILLIAM

Turning state hospital over to private firm is bad medicine

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

There's a scandal waiting to happen if GEO Care gets its hands on another Texas mental health hospital.

Last year, Texas legislators directed the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to solicit bids to privatize a public psychiatric hospital by this fall. GEO Care was the sole bidder to submit a proposal. DSHS officials will determine this month whether to recommend the proposal to state leaders. The department has yet to designate the hospital targeted for privatization.

A coalition of civil rights, mental health, labor, public policy and faith-based organizations recently sent a letter urging DSHS to reject GEO Care's proposal to manage one of the hospitals, which provide care to the indigent mentally ill and patients deemed incompetent to stand trial.

GEO Care's bid raises the obvious question. If this is such a lucrative offering, why is GEO Care, a subsidiary of the private prison corporation GEO Group, the only bidder for the job? Maybe because public mental health isn't - and shouldn't be - a profit-making deal. Without taking risky shortcuts, it's difficult to see how GEO Care will turn a profit.

GEO's track record in Montgomery County is a cautionary tale. Sixteen months after the Montgomery County Mental Health Treatment Facility opened in Conroe, the state's first publicly funded and privately run psychiatric hospital faces $53,000 in state fines for serious problems with patient care.

This is the tip of the GEO iceberg. The giant international private prison corporation, best known for operating correctional facilities and detention centers all over the world, has a troubled history in Texas.

There are two cases in point. The Coke County Juvenile Justice Center was shut down because of "unsanitary and unsafe conditions." And at the Reeves County Detention Center, inmates frustrated and scared by the quality of medical care after the death of an inmate in isolation staged an uprising that cost Reeves County taxpayers more than $1 million to repair the county-owned facility.

GEO's record in other states includes allegations of mismanagement and canceled contracts. In just the past five months, the company has made national and local headlines over multiple scandals documented at several different facilities. Last April, GEO contracts at three facilities ended in Mississippi, including at a youth facility that a federal judge described as having "allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate." In July, the Associated Press reported three gruesome deaths, including that of a patient who died in a scalding bathtub, at GEO's South Florida State Hospital.

Over the years, GEO has paid millions of dollars to satisfy lawsuits filed after the deaths of prisoners at its many facilities in various states.

Signatories of the letter opposing GEO privatization include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, Center for Public Policy Priorities, Disability Rights Texas, Grassroots Leadership, Texas NAACP, National Association of Social Workers Texas, Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, Texas Jail Project, Texas State Employees Union and United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society.

The coalition is right to oppose GEO's bid to privatize an unspecified state hospital. I oppose GEO too, and so should you.

Ramos is a clinical social worker in private practice in Houston and a member of the ACLU of Texas board of directors.